I joined a knitting group last summer and many of us like to listen to audio books while we knit, so now we’re also a book club! Our first book is Julie Clark’s The Last Flight. And my knit right now is a pair of socks.
In this novel, a young woman attempting to escape the military dictatorship rounding up dissidents in Buenos Aires accepts a position at a school in Patagonia as an English teacher in the 1970s. The school is on the edge of the world, in a manor house built by an aristocratic family at the beginning of the century. The home had once been a school, but it has been shut down for decades because everyone caught a mysterious illness and many of the students and faculty died. They say that the house is built on land that was cursed by the indigenous people the family stole it from. Now the school is being reopened by the domineering business mogul who grew up in the house before she was forced to flee the mystery illness.
While this is creepy, our brave heroine Mavi likes her chances at the school overlooking ice fields in Southern Argentina better than her chances on the streets of Buenos Aires. Once at the school, she meets the other instructors and the son of the headmistress, heir to the wealthy family who owns the manor. And he’s a dick. Or, he starts off that way. But then his personality completely changes. That’s not the only strange thing that happens. There is a mysterious visitor in the night. The girls begin to fall sick. The house begins to decay. Everything begins to spiral out of control.
This book had an interesting twist that I was a little annoyed by at first. I could see it coming and I was hoping for another outcome. But the reveal wasn’t as clunky as I was expecting it to be and the resolution was interesting. This is an okay novel. I was hoping for a little more horror, but it kept me interested. If you like slightly creepy mysteries and need a reasonably quick read, this is pretty good. I am planning on checking out other books by Faring in the future.
Set on the very edge of Patagonia, there is a girl school where there had previously been a tragedy. A mysterious illness once overtook the school. It is now reopening and in 1970s Argentina with a looming military dictatorship, Mavi can’t say no to a job that’ll take her out of Buenos Aires. I’m looking forward to this!
I did it! I read books in 2022! Not as many as I used to, but definitely more than any other year since COVID! I am so excited! I feel like I’m back! Kind of! So, without further ado, let’s get into it. In no particular order, here are my favorites of this past year!
I really enjoyed this book. It has mobsters. It has monsters. It has people behaving exactly as we know people behave during a pandemic in a pandemic. It’s set in colonial Shanghai. It has a sequel. I hightly recommend it.
2. The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai
This romance by an author who has an excellent social media presence was so satisfying. I liked the characters. I liked their romance. I liked that they both had a story arc. It was great.
3. The Girl from the Well by Rin Chupeco
I like horror movies a lot. Like, a lot a lot. My Netflix recs are basically just baking shows, kdramas, and buckets of guts. So, this seemed right up my alley. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be, but it was so good. Based on the Okiku myth, the ghost of a girl who was murdered, and has stuck around to torment her killer… and then torment more killers. I was taken in by the story and I needed to know how it ended. I just found out it has a sequel, too!
4. The Dispatcher by John Scalzi
I thought this was an interesting premise, so I downloaded it. In it, if you die by murder, you come back okay. Dispatchers are people who work in places like hospitals just in case things go wrong. The main character, Tony Valdez, is contacted by the police because a fellow dispatcher has gone missing. It gets sucked into a mystery about where his friend is and how he ended up there. There are two more books in the series. I binged them all back to back. They were entertaining.
5. Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
I started this ages ago (maybe in 2017? Like, ages ago) and then finished it this summer when I was visiting my sister. It was… I want to say beautiful? Laszlo Strange is an orphan librarian who talks himself into a position on a quest to help Weep, a place of legend, rid itself of the floating palace of slain gods. When they get to the city, he meets a woman in his dreams. The woman is a child of the slain gods and lives in the floating palace above the city. Every day they live their lives, and then at night, they meet in Laszlo’s dreams. It’s not as cheesy as I’m making it sound. There’s a little bit of mystery (Is Strange really an orphan? Where is he really from?) and a little bit of lore from the world. I really enjoyed the relationships in this book. It also has a sequel!
This is the second Stacey Abrams book I’ve read, but this is the first one that I’ve read under her pen name Selena Montgomery. I’m very excited to see how this thriller unfolds.
I was looking for something creepy and I remembered I had this. I am so excited!
What would you give up for immortality? Would you bargain your soul away for freedom? Addie LaRue is 23 years old in 1714 France. She’s about to be married off to a man she doesn’t love or have any interest in. She does not want to be a wife or a mother. She wants to live and see the world. She wants to love but not have attachments. In a moment of desperation, she bargains her soul away with a mysterious stranger to live a life away from the obligations of her small village. Unfortunately, she gets more than she bargains for because she is not able to leave a trace behind. People forget her as soon as they meet. She can’t say her name or even write it down. She can’t hold on to anything or own anything because it’s all easily forgotten. She has immortal life but she can’t make or keep any connections with anyone but her mysterious stranger, who she calls Luc. Addie is clever and stubborn and won’t let this get in her way. She finds ways to survive. People may not remember her but she finds ways to make her presence known. She inspires artists to draw and paint and write music. She lives on through various pieces of art and music for centuries. She has learned to be invisible and how to navigate the world without anyone every remembering she exists. That is until she meets Henry, who is the first person in 300 years who sees her and remembers her.
I enjoyed this book but it does take a while to get into it. The narrative goes back and forth from 2014 and the past and the transitions are not always clean. It does take a bit to figure out what is going on and how all this pieces together. However once all the characters have been introduced and we’ve seen the deal being made and how the curse plays itself out, the story picks up and you can only feel like this is not going to end well for everyone. I felt for Addie. She wants more than what is offered to her in 1714. Let’s be honest, it almost doesn’t matter when a woman lives, their options are limited. I could understand her desperation when she made her deal and her heartbreak as she then tries to navigate the world after. How even with immortal life, she has to make some truly terrible decisions to survive but she does. Partly because she is still curious about the world but also partly to spite Luc, who tries everything to break her. She learns to adapt. She learns to use Luc as inspiration but she also learns that as much as she hates him, she loves him because after all these centuries. He is the only one who knows her. So she lives on and will continue to live on and it’s kind of inspiring. The ending is really the only way a story like this could end. It’s neither happy or sad but bittersweet. Everyone gets what they want but also not what they want either. It’s an interesting premise and has so much more going on then what I’ve touched on here. It’s worth sticking with it to the end.
I might as well keep going with the Clairmont-Bishop Clan. I do like both Marcus and Phoebe. I hope the best for them.
Well 2020 was a dumpster fire of a year. Thank goodness it’s about to end. We’ve been pretty open with our struggles we had this year when it came to our reading lists. We didn’t read as much as we wanted and don’t have as many books to pick from. So this year we are going to do something different this year. Instead of picking our Top 5 or 10 books we are just going to list our favorite books we read this year. So here we go.
Back to Diana and Matthew. I’m already 100 pages in and well Matthew is a mess.
2 Women, So Many Books 